Everyday Contexts of Camera Phone Use:
Steps Toward Technosocial Ethnographic Frameworks
Daisuke Okabe
Keio University
Mizuko Ito
University of Southern California and Keio University
To appear in: Höflich, Joachim & Hartmann, Maren Eds. Mobile Communication in
Everyday Life: An Ethnographic View. Berlin: Frank & Timme
Introduction
A friend you have not seen for a while, a pet's endearing gaze, Tokyo Tower, a funnylooking stuffed panda, gorgeous parfait at a new café, a classmate who has just fallen into
a puddle, a child opening wide for a spooned-in mouthful, or a miniature milk package on
an airline tray -- the camera phone makes it possible to take and share pictures of the
stream of people, places, pets and objects in the flow of everyday life. Around town, and
particularly at tourist spots, the sounds of the camera phone’s shutter have become an
unremarkable part of the setting. Although the camera phone has only recently become a
fixture in everyday life in Japan, already it feels like a familiar presence. It is the latest
portable media technology to become commonplace, one more component of the layered
information and media ecologies that overlay our everyday experience in urban Japan.
This paper reports on an ethnographic study of camera phone usage in Tokyo,
based on a diary study of usage patterns. First, we briefly describe the current state of
camera phone adoption in Japan, and introduce our methodology and conceptual
framework for this study. We frame our study as an example of adapting traditional
anthropological approaches to the study of everyday practices that are distributed across
real and virtual settings. The body of the paper describes emergent practices of camera
phone use in Japan, providing concrete examples from the ethnographic material. Camera
phone use is still very much an emergent practice, though we are beginning to see some
usage patterns stabilizing. There are indicators of practices of picture taking and sharing
that differ both from the uses of the stand-alone camera and the kinds of social sharing
that happened via mobile phone communication (Kato, Okabe, Ito, and Uemoto 2005;
Okabe and Ito 2003).
Camera Phone Adoption and Research
Built-in camera functions are now a popular and accepted add-on to the mobile phone.
The camera phone is part of an overall trend towards non-voice functions in the mobile.
Recent years have seen a shift to email as the dominant modality for mobile
communication, now exchanged more frequently than calls in Japan (Matsuda 2005;
Okada 2005). More recently, this email exchange is coming to include photos and
moving images. In October 2000, J-Phone (now Vodafone) launched its first camera-
phone handset, the J-SH04, to a skeptical population. In particular, the introduction of a
terminal with the “Sha-mail”(photo mail) function by J-Phone in November 2000
changed mobile phone practice, making it possible to send each other photographs with
the mobile phone. According to estimates by the Telecommunication Carriers
Association (TCA), camera phones now comprise over 60% of all mobile phones in use
in Japan. The trend is towards camera phones becoming a standard feature of mobile
phones and it is clear that they are here to stay.
Camera phone development has advanced dramatically in a number of areas,
particularly in the resolution of images. High-end terminals can reach the 2-mega-pixel
level, and they might include features such as auto focus, optical zoom, and removable
memory card (Kato, Okabe, Ito, and Uemoto 2005). Although research on camera phone
usage in Japan is still limited, some survey work is indicating certain patterns of usage.
In a multiple-choice survey by japan.internet.com (2003) asked how they used photos
taken by their camera phones, almost 90% of respondents answered that they “view them
on their handset,” followed by “use them as wallpaper for their mobile phone” at almost
60%, with “email them to friends and family” at over 50%, and “upload them to a PC”
trailing at 35%. In a survey of 300 Internet users (men and women between the ages of
ten and fifty), japan.internet.com (2003), found that 65% reported using a camera phone.
In response to the question, “In what kinds of settings and for what purposes to you
actually use the camera function?” the most common answer (75%) was “recording and
commemorating moments with family, friends, acquaintances,” followed by “recording
and commemorating interesting or unusual things in everyday life” (69%) and “travel
photos such as of scenery” (39%).
As camera phones spread in Japan and other countries, we are just beginning to see
the emergence of an international empirical corpus on related usage patterns. Most of the
early qualitative studies of camera phone use have been based on quasi-experimental
methods that involve providing image capture and sending technologies to users
(Koskinen 2005; Koskinen, Kurvinen, and Lohtonen 2002; Ling and Julsrud 2005; Van
House, Davis, Ames, Finn, and Viswanathan 2005; Van House, Davis, Takhteyev, Ames,
and Finn 2004), or reducing some of the barriers to image capture and sharing among
existing users (Ito 2005a; Kindberg, Spasojevic, Fleck, and Sellen 2004). In both of these
cases, the approach tends to be focused on anticipating future uses of technical capacities
that are not yet well established as consumer technologies (see Koskinen 2005). By
contrast, like Oksman’s chapter in this volume and the work of C. Riviere and C. Licoppe
in France (2004), our work described here represents naturalistic observations of camera
phone usage among existing users. Because Japan is among the first national contexts to
have widespread popular adoption of camera phones, we have been in a unique position
to conduct more naturalistic observations of an emergent but popularly adopted set of
technologies. In other work, we have taken a more experimental approach in piloting a
new set of technological capabilities among existing camera phone users (Ito 2005a).The
state of the field in camera phone research is indicative of the social study of new
technologies more generally, which tends to hybridize future-oriented methods from
technology design with methods from the social sciences which have traditionally
focused on the study of existing social patterns. Here, we use our study of camera phone
usage as a way of illustrating a particular form of methodological hybridization that
focuses on the strengths of an anthropological method, while also responding to ongoing
changes to the technologies underlying our social activity. In this, our work is focused on
documenting existing practices rather than designing for new ones, but we hope to
demonstrate the relevance of our approach in uncovering resilient patterns of behavior
that can inspire reconsideration of technosocial engineering.
Research Design
Our Studies
Our research on camera phone grows is part of a broader research program that is
examining the use of portable ICTs in urban Japan, centered at Keio Shonan Fujisawa
Campus near Tokyo. We began our research in 2000, with exploratory interviews with
college and high school students. After that, we designed a diary-based study of mobile
phone use reported on elsewhere (Ito 2005b; Ito and Okabe 2005) and adapted from the
study reported in Grinter and Eldridge (2001). This method of study relies heavily on
self-documentation and self-reflection on the part of the participant. We begin with a preinterview to get basic background information and train the participants in the selfdocumentation process. Participants are asked to note every instance of mobile phones
use and the context in which the usage occurred. In the diaries, they note the time of
usage, who they were in contact with, whether they received or initiated the contact,
where they were, what kind of communication type was used, why they chose that form
of communication, who was in the vicinity at the time, if there were any problems
associated with the usage, and the content of the communication. After the period of selfdocumentation, we conduct an in-depth interview where we gather more information
about their ICT habits, and go over the content of the diary in detail. Participants are
compensated for their time. This has varied somewhat depending on the specific study
they are involved in, but for diary studies we have offered the equivalent of about $200
USD.
The camera phone research described here relied on an adaptation of these selfdocumentation protocols in a follow-up study focused on camera phones users. The
central body of data is a set of "camera phone diaries" and interviews collected between
August-September 2003. In addition to the content of our standard diary, participants
were asked to keep records of photos taken, received, and shared off their mobile phone.
After completion of the camera phone diaries, we conducted in-depth interviews to
understand more detailed information about the context of camera phone use. Our study
involved two high school students (aged 17-18), eight college students (aged 19-23), two
housewives with teenage children (in their forties), and three professionals (aged 29-34).
Every participant was asked to submit their latest 10 pictures. All participants resided in
the Tokyo Kanto region.
The distinctiveness of our data collection method lies in the combination of
detailed and contextualized observational data collected by the participants themselves,
and in-depth interviews where researchers and participants co-construct the meaning and
patterns behind the observational data. In the case of private and mobile communications,
it is not realistic for an ethnographer to directly observe all of the interstitial
communications and information access that mobile phone users engage with. It is also
not sufficient to only collect usage logs, since we are seeking the contextual information
on location, setting, and situation in addition to information on communication itself.
While retaining an ethnographic commitment to capturing details of everyday behavior in
the contexts that they occur, our approach departs from a traditional anthropological
method which relies on the ethnographer participating in, observing, and documenting
behaviors and settings. While we have conducted observational studies of mobile phone
use in public transportation (Okabe and Ito 2005), most of our research takes a personcentered rather than a location-centered approach. While the mobile phone has
significantly reshaped the logic of urban space, we believe that the mobile phone’s
primary context of meaning is located in relation to personal communication and identity.
By focusing on personal meaning and relying on a self-documentation method, our
participants begin taking a role akin to research collaborators or assistants. We pay them
for their time and effort, and they also have access to the data that they generate. Of
course, this does not mean vacating our role or perspective as professional researchers
and social scientists in structuring and interpreting the data. The diary provides the
framework and discipline for documenting activities that laypeople would not generally
document or even recall otherwise. Further, it is through the final interviews that we ask
participants to reflect on their activities and verbalized the logic of their practices in terms
of our research categories and frameworks.
Conceptual and Methodological Framework
This paper builds on the conceptual framework developed in our earlier studies, where
we have examined new kinds of “technosocial situations” that are emerging through
mobile phone usage, where users assemble social situations as a hybrid of virtual and
physically co-present relations and encounters (Ito and Okabe 2005). For example, one
key technosocial situation we have identified is “ambient virtual co-presence,” where
users use text messaging to inscribe a space of shared awareness of one another, sending
messages that are primarily designed to keep in touch, rather than to communicate
specific bits of information. This paper extends this framework to the use of camera
phones, where we have seen similar kinds of technosocial situations emerging, though
inflected in new ways due to the visual dimension. For example, the situation we identify
as “intimate visual co-presence” grows out of the idea of “ambient virtual co-presence”
but is a more intimate and restrictive social sphere due to characteristics specific to visual
sharing.
By mobilizing a situational frame, our studies represent a translation of traditional
ethnographic analytic frameworks to newly technologized social practices. Our
technosocial framework has dictated our data collection methods as well are our mode of
analysis. Much of what has been traditionally been considered stable locations, contexts,
and infrastructures for social are action are in flux, and increasingly distributed and
technologically dependent. Certainly many types of activities can be pursued with a
spatially localized form of participant observation that analyzes behavior as structured by
face-to-face and physically localized interaction. In places like Japan, however, more and
more social and cultural context is mediated and spatially distributed, requiring
ethnographers to capture and document these fragmented activities, as well as develop
ways of analyzing them that take into account their unique characteristics. With the
advent of the mobile phone, in particular, remote social relations and cultural contexts are
omnipresent in all settings of action, mobilized with the touch of a keypad and always
close at hand in a pocket or a handbag.
Our analytic challenge has been to retain an anthropological focus on native
meaning and situated practice, while also recognizing the importance of remote and
mediated meanings and social relations. Much of the work in technology and design
studies is primarily interested in the specifics of individualized activity and interaction,
rather than on cross-cutting communal and cultural structure surrounding the activity. By
contrast, most work in anthropology prioritizes settings for behavior that are spatially
localized and communal rather than private, atomized, and distributed. We hybridize
these approaches by developing analytic categories that are embedded in established
social structures and systems of meaning, but are newly embodied through technical
mediation. Our categories of technosocial situations emerge from the specifics of the
technologically enabled activities we have observed, but rely on meanings and structure
more general than these specific situations. For example, our concept of newsworthiness
in photo sharing grows out of the more general and longstanding of native concept of
“neta” that manifests in a wide range of cultural domains. Similarly, our categories of
couple intimacy and peer group interaction are not specific to camera phone usage, but
are grounded in our ethnographic understanding of the structure of Japanese society. In
other words, we try to stay true to two key anthropological tenets: The first is to take the
native’s point of view (Geertz 1989) rather than mobilizing categories of meaning that
are primarily analytical and have no local counterpart. The second is to base our analysis
on patterns of meaning and social structure that cross-cut domains that are institutionally
distinct. For example, cultural categories of gender difference or personal versus public
are mobilized settings ranging from educational, religious, recreational, and political
domains (Yanagisako and Delaney 1995). Anthropological analysis thus seeks to relate
the specific situation and activity in question with resilient and generative native
categories and structures.
In this, our analytic approach differs from a strictly ethnomethodological
approach that deals with activity as emergent in interaction rather than generated as part
of a pre-existing social and cultural system. Our approach also differs from certain
sociological frames that seek to develop analytic or technical categories that transcend the
specifics of local social and cultural structures. Reviewing existing camera phone studies
may provide some specificity to these general claims. For example, Koskinen et al.
(2002) take an ethnomethological approach that focuses on the details of turn taking and
interaction in the exchange of messages, but does not seek to analyze the content of these
exchanges in relation to pre-existing social and cultural categories. In a more recent
study, Van House et al. (2004) develop categories based on “higher-order motives” for
mobilizing personal photos: social relationships, self-expression, and self-presentation.
These categories are targeted to provide a rubric that can generalize across current and
emergent technologies in order to inform design. Although their categories are quite
different, Kindberg et al. (2004) also work to develop categories that are primarily
theoretical rather than native, creating a grid of social versus individual, and affective
versus functional in categorizing camera phone photos. Ling and Julsrud’s (2005)
analysis of genres in multimedia messaging is probably closest to the analytic approach
that we take, identifiying culturally recognizable frames for communication. But their
approach is experimental rather than naturalistic, so differs from ours in the nature of the
intervention and data collection. In contrast to design-oriented studies that seek to
optimize human-device interaction and drivers of activity, our analytic frame is oriented
primarily towards understanding native contexts of meanings and frames for action.
Our analysis is not optimized for the analysis, testing, and critique of specific
technical affordances, but this does not mean it is irrelevant for design and engineering.
Our goal is to provide descriptions that present the native point of view and the
phenomenology of experience in everyday life in Tokyo, which can ideally put designers
and engineers into a local frame of understanding that may differ from their existing one.
Further, the underlying systems of meaning and social structure woven into our
categories are generative and resilient and will continue to structure emergent behaviors.
Our argument is that technical structure is inseparable from structures of culture and
society. Thus even design efforts that are technology focused and don't intervene in
cultural or social negotiations need to be approached as an intervention into incumbent
technosocial systems. Based on our commitments to a technosocial frame of ethnographic
analysis, we have arrived at categories of practice that are keyed to native frames for
action. These are personal archiving, intimate visual co-presence, and peer-to-peer news
and sharing. The first might be considered a kind of personal self-authoring practice that
is unique to the visual medium of photography. The second two are extensions of the
kinds of technosocial situations we have observed in prior forms of mobile media
exchange, revolving around the sharing of information among close friends and families.
Overall, these uses conform to a more general pattern we have observed in our research
towards personal, portable, and pedestrian forms of technology use through the use of
handheld devices (Ito, Okabe, and Matsuda 2005). Mobile phones and camera phone use
are enabling forms of communication and information access that are closely tied to the
everyday, personal, and street-level visions of its users.
Technosocial Situations of Camphone Use
Personal Archiving
Compared to mobile email, camera phones have a personal collection and archiving
function. Most photos taken by the camera phone are not sent or shown to others, but are
captured more as a personal visual archive. Camera phones enable personal visual
archiving and authoring, a street level everyday visual viewpoint.
One type of visual capture for personal use is visual note taking. For example, we
saw one user snapping a photo of a job advertisement poster and another taking a picture
of the titles of some books she intended to track down in the library (Figure 1).
Figure 1: Recording book titles and publisher information
Okabe: Is this at a bookstore?
Interviewee: Um, it is at a used book district. Each copy was really expensive, about
¥4000. I thought “These I will borrow from the library,” so this photo is really a
memo to myself. Lately I take photos of things I want to buy. Like, I want to buy
this book.
Okabe: Did you really do that?
Interviewee: Yes, I did look for the book in the library.
This kind of visual note taking is relatively infrequent among the cases we recorded.
When they are no longer needed, these kinds of photos tend to get erased from memory.
A more common practice is to spontaneously take a photo of some scene or viewpoint on
everyday life. For example, one 20-year-old college student snaps several pictures a day
with her camera phone: a really large shell that she found on a beach; a photo of an
interesting view from an escalator at a station that she frequents (Figure 2). Dog pictures
(Figure 3) were taken by female high school student, age16. She often takes photos of her
family pet dog, when it acts cute.
Figure 2: A picture of a large shell (left),
and an escalator in the station (right)
Figure 3: Pictures of a cute pet
These photos of mundane scenes are indicative of an emergent practice of visually
archiving an individual’s everyday life. These photos are not posed or staged, or
particularly well-framed our thought out. Rather, they are snapped casually, with the
intention of possibly looking at them a little later, recording a momentary slice of a
viewpoint on everyday life. The following photo (Figure 4) and interview is indicative of
this kind of casual attitude towards photo taking.
Figure 4: A photo of a view of Yokohama Bay taken when out with a friend
Okabe: This is the ocean, or rather the bay?
Interviewee: Yes
Okabe: Were you out with a friend, just hanging out and it was like “okay, I’ll just
snap a photo”?
Interviewee: Yeah, I think we were just hanging out.
Okabe: How casual was the photo?
Interviewee: I was just walking along and thought, oh, this looks nice.
Okabe: And you got your mobile out.
Interviewee: I thought if I snapped it I might remember it just a little later.
Most of the photos that people take are not intended be sent to others. One example we
gathered was particularly indicative of this sense of personal visual collecting. In the
following interview, a college student describes a photo she took as an omamori (good
luck amulet). In Japan, people often carry omamori simply to have a trusted spirit close
by. This student sees her photo as a similar kind of presence.
Iinterviewee: …There are seven students at that farewell party. I took the photo of
my professor’s profile while he was talking.
Okabe: Did you send or use this picture?
Informant: No, this photo is just an omamori.
Within the broader ecology of personal record-keeping and archiving technologies,
camera phones occupy a unique niche. One participant says, “The camera phone is my
eye. The personal viewpoint is the most important thing.” These are not random photos,
but rather are highly personal viewpoints on everyday life that are archived on the small
screen. Most of our informants described a unique pleasure in building this personal
viewpoint archive. Most of these photos only have meaning to the individual who took
them, a quality that makes them even more valuable as a resource for personal identity
construction.
Intimate Visual Co-Presence
The photos described thus far were saved on an individual’s handset and were not shared
with others. In contrast to personal uses, photo sharing provides a window into the
organization of social relations through these new technologies. We are finding that the
sharing of photos is related but interestingly different from some of the patterns we have
seen with mobile email exchange.
Many noted that sharing photos feels more “intrusive” than email, and tend to feel
more narcissistic. This is particularly true for photo mail as a “push” modality that gets
sent uninvited. Most of the sharing we saw of photos was off the handset screens. People
would show their friends the photos they had in their phone on occasions that they got
together. We have found that photos are generally only emailed to intimates such as a
lover, spouse, or very close friend. In the case of mobile email, we found that most
people had regular exchanges with 2-5 others, but not more than 10 people (Ito and
Okabe 2005). With photo mail, the circle for exchange tends to be even smaller and the
content more selective.
We would first like to describe some examples of people sharing photos off of their
handset screens. In the following interview, a collect student describes how he went out
to Yokohama with a childhood friend, and later showed the photos to his mother.
Okabe: So your friend from sixth grade in Yokohama, you still get together?
Interviewee: Yes, I we still get together.
Okabe: This is from when you two went out?
Interviewee: Yes.
….
Interviewee: This is a picture I took with my friend.
Okabe: Why did you take it?
Interviewee: I took it thinking I would show my mom. My friend’s appearance
really changed compared to elementary school.
Okabe: Oh, so you were meeting with your friend occasionally even after
elementary school, but you mom had not seen her.
Interviewee: That’s right.
Sharing photos with close friends by showing them the keitai screen is a common
practice. There are technical and economic reasons why people don’t email photos to
each other very frequently. Generally photos cannot be sent between people subscribed
to different carriers, and the packet fees for sending photos are expensive. But there are
also interesting social reasons that limit people’s emailing of photos. Apparently, in
comparison to sending text messages, sending photos is perceived as “intrusive,” and
“narcissistic.” The following photo (Figure 5) and interview excerpt indicate this view.
One college student send a photo of herself with a new hairstyle to her boyfriend, with
the comment, “How does this look?”
Figure 5: Taking a photo of a new hairstyle and emailing it to her
boyfriend
Interviewee: I might take a quick photo of my hairstyle and check if it looks okay.
This is at home. I’d take 2 or 3 and pick one that looks good and send it out
asking if it looks okay.
Okabe: To who?
Interviewee: I guess to my boyfriend. I had plans to see him the next day… If my
boyfriend had a camera phone I would send it, saying “What do you think?” But
he doesn’t have one now. I could never send a picture like that to a friend.
They’d think I was an idiot. What point is it to look at friend’s face like that?
In this interview, she describes how she would send a photo of a new hairstyle to
a boyfriend but not to a girlfriend. Decisions of whether to send a photo or what kind of
photo to send are made based on social relationships and levels of intimacy. This same
college student made a different kind of decision with respect to a photo of some steamed
sweet bean buns that she made (Figure 6). After she made them, she sent this photo out
to several of her friends with the caption “Look, look what I have cooked!” Unlike the
photo of herself, she felt that this was something she could share with friends. It seems
the reason for this was that it was less narcissistic than a picture of herself, and it was a
more “newsworthy” even than a new hairstyle.
Figure 6: Home-made steamed sweet bean buns, sent to close
friends
Figure 7, like the picture of the steamed buns, was a picture shared between friends. In
the interview, our research subject says how he feels that if it is between very close
friends he feels that picture sharing is appropriate, and he might share a picture in
exchange for one received. The photograph below was received by a female professor,
age 34, while she was away on a business trip overseas. Her husband emailed her a
camera phone photo of their son riding a two-wheeler for the first time (Figure 8). It is
an example of a photo that is newsworthy among the circle of the nuclear family, another
social unit that shares a level of intimacy comparable to couples and close friends.
Figure 7: A photo of home-made hamburger steak
Figure 8: A photo of a child riding a bike, sent between parents
Interviewee: This is a picture of some hamburger steak I made.
Okabe: Can you tell me the context for this photo?
Interviewee: This one—a professor that I am close to sent me an amazing photo
of a flying frisbee. I felt like I needed to send some kind of image in return. I
happened to be making hamburger steak, so I thought I would just send this off to
him.
Interviewee: When that first frisbee photo arrived, you didn’t think it was
annoying?
Inteviewee: Not at all. I thought it was really fun and it made me happy.
Okabe: When you sent the photo of the hamburger steaks you made, did you
attach some text?
Interviewee: Yes, I did, I wrote, “Aren’t I an independent guy?”
These examples demonstrate how the sharing of photos is tied to a sense of
“distributed co-presence” that we have found people constructing through the exchange
of texts messaging (Ito and Okabe 2005). In the case of text messaging, people will often
email intimates with information about their current status, such as “I’m walking up the
hill now,” or “just watched a great TV show.” The visual information shared between
intimates also represents a similar social practice, of sharing ambient awareness with
close friends, family and loved ones who are not physically co-present. As in the case of
the prior mediums of text and voice, these communications are part of the construction of
“full-time intimate communities” (Nakajima, Himeno, and Yoshii 1999) or what Ichiyo
Habuchi (2005) has called a “tele-cocoon.” These perspectives are based on a growing
body of work on mobile phone use in Japan is showing that people generally exchange
the bulk of their mobile communication with a relatively small and intimate social group
of 2-5 others. The exchange of communication with this group, in turn, becomes a
reflexive process of self-authoring and viewpoint construction.
Peer-to-Peer News and Reporting
In addition to the ongoing mundane sharing of visual information between intimates who
are in close touch, camera phones are also being used to capture and share what people
consider more noteworthy events that others might be interested in. In Japanese,
"material" for news and stories is called "neta." The term has strong journalistic
associations, but also gets used to describe material that can become the topic of
conversation among friends or family: a new store seen on the way to work; a cousin who
just dropped out of high school; a funny story heard on the radio. The following photos
represent this kind of neta photo taken by young people and shared between peers.
Figure 9:
Neta photos of a matrix-style move (left), a student who passed out drunk and got
vandalized by friends (center), and an odd statue sited in town (right)
Camera phones provide a new tool for making these everyday neta not just verbally but
also visually shareable. These moment might have been talked about between friends, but
now are captured visually and enter the stream of conversation and exchange. Figure 10
shows embarrassing moments caught on film by a professor. One student just fell into a
puddle, another student got drunk and wrapped toilet paper around his waist and stuck on
a “beginner driver” sticker at a lab party.
Figure 10: A student who fell into a
puddle (left), a drunk student who
wrapped toilet paper around his waist and stuck on a “beginner driver” sticker at a party
(right)
The following photo (Figure 11) also represents an image in this vein. In the
interview about this photo, the college student who took the photo (age 23), describes
how he captured the image intending it to share with others in the near future.
Figure 11: A can of beer stuck to a forehead without the use of adhesives
Interviewee: This one—when I was fooling around with a friend a can got stuck
to his forehead [laugh].
Okabe: What happened to this photo? Did you send it to someone?
Interviewee: I did. This is kind of interesting so I held on to it. It’s an interesting
image.
Okabe: Did you show it to anyone?
Interviewee: Yes, I did. I showed it to some friends.
My last example (Figure 12) is directed toward a somewhat different kind of audience
than the family and friends that are generally the recipients of camera phone images.
This research subject has an online photo journal site that she sends her camera phone
photos to. The site is public, so could be viewed by anybody.
Figure 12: A panda ride at an amusement area on the roof of a department store
Interviewee: This next one is of a really scary panda ride. It is a panda with
sunken eyes at an amusement park at the top of a department store. This one was
on its way to [the photo journal site] yapeus. It was really scary.
Okabe: Were you thinking of yapeus when you took the photo?
Interviewee: Yes.
…
Okabe: Is this more like neta than just a regular everyday photo? When you send
a photo are you selecting things that some anonymous viewers might think is
interesting?
Interviewee: Yeah. I think of if people will get it, things that I want to say “Look!
Look!”
Okabe: Is your own personal viewpoint important?
Interviewee: Yes, that is the key thing.
Through the capture and sharing of small but significant visual events in people’s
lives, camera phones are contributing to a kind of everyday photojournalism, where
people are attentive to images and events that might be interesting or newsworthy events.
Some of these photos might make it onto a photo journal site or into the news if the
photographer happens to capture an event newsworthy to a general public. But most of
these photos are trafficked among peers, and are newsworthy only among friends and
families. We would argue that the transformation of “news” in the hands of these
amateur photographers a less spectacular, but perhaps more significant shift in behavior
and visual awareness than the photos that might grab the latest headline on a news site.
Conclusion
The practices we have described of capturing and sharing visual information are
inseparable from social relations and contexts, and grow out of the patterns of mobile
phone use that have been established through voice and text exchange as well as practices
of amateur photography and resilient categories of social relationships. This includes the
authoring of personal life stories through photographs, the construction of distributed copresence through mobile media exchange, and peer-based sharing of news and stories. In
conclusion, we would like to comment on some of the unique social practices that are
being constructed through the merging of the mobile phone and the digital camera into a
single device.
The social function of the camera phone differs from the social and cultural position
of the camera and the phone in some important ways. In comparison to the traditional
camera, most of photos taken by camera phone are short-lived and ephemeral images.
The camera phone is a more ubiquitous and lightweight presence, and is used for more
personal, less objectified viewpoint and sharing among intimates. Traditionally, the
camera would get trotted out for special excursions and events -- noteworthy moments
bracketed off from the mundane. By contrast, camera phones capture the more fleeting
and unexpected moments of surprise, beauty and adoration in the everyday. The everyday
is now the site of potential news and visual archiving as a user might snap a scene from a
familiar train station or a friend who just fell into a puddle. By embodying the
characteristics of the mobile phone as a “personal, portable, pedestrian” device (Ito,
Okabe & Matsuda 2005), the function the camera has shifted.
One consequence of this more personal and pervasive viewpoint is that the camera is
more strongly associated with an individual and intimate viewpoint. The traditional
camera tended to take on more of the role of a third party, photographing a group photo
or a scene that is framed in a more distanced way. The camera phone tends to be used
more frequently as a kind of archive of a personal trajectory or viewpoint on the world, a
collection of fragments of everyday life. This kind of archiving is unique to the visual
medium, in the sense that photos are often taken for purely personal consumption, where
as text messages are generally created with the intent to share with others.
Sharing of visual information, by contrast is a more selective and intimate
enterprise than sharing of text. Users are still working out the social protocols for
appropriate visual sharing, but seem to take pleasure in the adding visual information to
the stream of friendly and intimate exchange of opinions, and news. Camera phones
enable an expanded field for chronicling and displaying self and viewpoint to others in a
new kind of everyday visual storytelling. Camera phones makes ubiquitous visual access
to others possible. In other words, the gaze of others is always present as a potentiality,
leading to a heightened sense of visual awareness and a growing centrality of images in
the ongoing social exchanges of everyday life. The camera phone is the latest addition to
our technosocial repertoire that enables us to mobilize our existing social relationships
and systems of meanings in ways that are both innovative and locally intelligible.
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by DoCoMo House at Keio University and the Annenberg
Center for Commnication at the University of Southern California.. The fieldwork was
supported by Kunikazu Amagasa.
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